KISS — Keep It Simple

The simplest thing that fully solves the stated problem. Simple means easy to read and change, not clever or short.

Rules for agents

• Prefer a plain function to a class, a class to a framework, standard library to a dependency.
• No config option, plugin point, or abstraction layer without a current concrete caller.
• Keep functions short enough to hold in your head; flatten nesting with early returns.
• Name things literally. retryCount beats n.
• If explaining the design takes more than a few sentences, simplify it.

Trade-off

Simple is not naive. Do not skip error handling, validation, or concurrency safety in the name of simplicity — those are part of the problem.

Smells

Metaprogramming for one case, deep inheritance, indirection with a single implementation, a dependency used for one function.